Electrical connector inserts are used to provide an interface for connecting a component to conventional wiring that transmits signals to and from the component. Thus, a typical electrical connector insert, such as those manufactured to the ARINC 600 specification for the aerospace industry and commercially available from Tri-Star Electronics and others, includes openings on one side into which connection portions of the component, such as pins, may be placed and connections to single wires or small wire bundles on an opposite side. A component may be any type of electrical equipment, any type of wiring, any type of connector, or any other type of electrical element. The openings of an insert may be arranged in any manner to interface with a desired component. Thus, the openings of an insert are typically defined based upon the arrangement, size and shape of the connection portions of the component to which the insert provides an interface to the wiring. Examples of single wires or small wire bundles include one or more single wires, coaxial wires, twisted wire pairs, and optical fibers.
In many industries, such as the aerospace industry, components are arranged in trays that are placed on shelves in a rack. For example, in an aircraft, there may be many shelves and racks of various types of components. To hold the electrical connector inserts at an appropriate position to interface with the desired components and to permit blind mating of the inserts with respective components, one or more connector inserts may be positioned within a connector shell. The connector shell, therefore, defines openings into which connector inserts may be positioned, and the location of the openings in the shell correspond to the position of the connector portions of a respective component.
Flat wire, which may also be known as flex circuit, may be used in a variety of applications to provide connectivity between desired elements. Flat wire, as known to those skilled in the art, is made of multiple substantially parallel conductive traces defined upon an insulative material, where the conductive traces are laid out in a planar arrangement. Thus, flat wire is capable of providing numerous conductive traces that are separated by sufficient insulation to prevent any interference among the traces and to permit easy access to the traces. Flat wire is typically utilized in computer technologies and microelectronics.
As the disclosure of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/731,829, entitled “An Integration Area, System and Method for Providing Interconnections Among Components” filed on Dec. 9, 2003 describes, flat wire may be used for integration areas that provide interconnections within, between or among various components. These integration areas provide efficient, easy to access and easy to modify interconnections that are separate from the conductive path between components. As such, the conductive path is not complicated by the interconnections. As described in the above-referenced application, at least some of the integration areas made from flat wire segments may be attached to the connector inserts to provide interconnections within and between the components associated with the connector inserts.
Thus, it would be advantageous to utilize a connector insert that is directly attached to a flat wire segment to take advantage of the various integration areas that flat wire segments afford, as described in the above-referenced application. While conventional connectors utilized in computer technologies and microelectronics may be attached to flat wire segments, conventional connector inserts are only capable of connecting to single or small numbers of wires in bundles, not flat wire segments that include numerous conductive traces separated by insulation. The conventional connectors utilized in computer technologies and microelectronics would not work for connector inserts because such connectors are not designed to integrate the various types of connection portions of components that are required of connector inserts. Thus, there is a need for a connector insert attached to flat wire segments. In addition, the connector insert should retain the industry accepted openings into which connection portions of the component are positioned.